After a heavy snowfall, Emily begins the day before Wendell wakes. Finn kindly clears the cottage steps, and Aud later arrives on snowshoes with beeswax and foul-smelling protective candles meant to keep the tall ones and their music away from the door. Emily doubts the recipe’s effectiveness but notes it carefully, while Wendell dismisses the candles as nonsense and suggests using them anyway to preserve goodwill with the villagers.

Emily then visits Auður’s family to investigate what happened after the Hidden Ones took their daughter. Ketil and Hild explain that Auður vanished two days after Christmas while gathering mushrooms and returned a little over a week later after a hunter found her wandering with strange mushrooms that dissolved in his hand. Emily learns that Auður can no longer speak or care for herself, obeys commands without judgment, and compulsively wanders outside during the darkest nights, so her family now ties her to the bed each winter night. The interview gives Emily details but no cure, and she realizes she knows no close parallel for Auður’s condition.

Back at the cottage, Wendell avoids hard labor by lingering with village notables while others clear snow. Later, Emily watches him flirt unsuccessfully with Lilja as she chops wood, amused because she knows Lilja is already committed elsewhere. Emily spends the day working, while Wendell contributes little scholarly value but continues making the cottage unexpectedly comfortable through small domestic improvements.

That evening, Wendell unexpectedly stays in with Emily instead of going to the tavern, and their conversation turns personal. After teasing, he reveals that he has a small amount of brownie ancestry on his mother’s side. Emily then presses him about his past, and Wendell admits that he is a faerie prince whose father’s third wife had his five older siblings executed and sent him into exile. He confirms that he wants to kill his stepmother, not for ambition’s sake, but because reclaiming the throne is the only way he can return home safely.

Wendell explains that he has spent ten years searching the mortal world for a forgotten back door into his realm, since ordinary routes would be guarded. He also reveals that his need for academic success and funding is tied to this search. Emily, motivated by both sympathy and intellectual ambition, decides to help him and begins taking notes at once, convinced she can find the door better than he can. Their talk continues into a discussion of how little mortals can truly understand the Folk, Wendell’s realm of Silva Lupi, and Emily’s preference for impossible subjects. The mood lightens when Emily tests an old faerie superstition by turning Wendell’s cloak inside out; he pretends to fall mysteriously ill, then laughs at her concern, sending Emily off to bed annoyed.